Château d’Audrieu

An 18th-century family château between Caen and Bayeux, listed as a historic monument and run as a Relais & Châteaux hotel with 29 rooms and suites.

It sits in 25 hectares of park and formal gardens with a consecrated chapel in the grounds, which matters in France, where most venues can only offer a symbolic ceremony.

Event rooms take up to 100, and the estate is let for exclusive use, which is how nearly every wedding here works.

Normandy is the value argument on this list: the same standard of building and service as a Loire or Burgundy château at a lower rate, two hours and a quarter from Paris and forty minutes from a ferry port that brings British guests over with their cars.